Tag: usability

Forms are ubiquitous in the world of information and referral. Many of us use online intake forms embedded in software to record calls; we use online search forms in resource databases, and we provide forms for users and agencies to contact us. Poorly designed forms can cause confusion for users and result in bad information being entered. If users don’t understand why they’re being asked for certain information, they may simply refuse to provide the information. In their book Forms That Work, Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney propose that forms involve three layers:

The relationship of a form is the relationship between the organization that is asking the questions and the person that is answering.

The conversation of a form comes from the questions that it asks, any other instructions, and the way the form is arranged into topics.

The appearance of a form is the way it looks: the arrangement of text, input areas such as fields and graphics, and the use of color. (Jarrett & Gaffney, 2009)

The user experience involved in each of these three layers has implications for the success of a form.

Relationship and Conversation

It can be challenging to organize the flow of an intake form to promote accurate collection of information while facilitating natural dialogue between an I&R Specialist and a caller. One common problem with online forms is that questions may seem random if each new piece of information doesn’t relate to what’s previously been requested. When an I&R Specialist is acting as an intermediary between a caller and an intake form, it’s easy to explain why certain information is being requested – there’s a more personal relationship and conversation happening. In a purely web-based setting, it becomes crucial to gain users’ trust by clearly indicating who we are, why we’re requesting certain information, and how that information relates to what the user has already entered. Jarrett and Gaffney provide this advice: “It’s usually best to ask anticipated questions before you move into something unexpected or unusual. Ease into questions that may intrude on the user’s privacy by dealing with neutral topics first.”

Example form field with explanation for why information is being requested.

The relationship between your organization and the users of your online forms may be relatively clear, but it always helps to make sure that your public online forms are clearly labeled with your logo, and provide reassurance to the user about how their information will be used and where it will be sent.

Appearance

The appearance of forms is often the area over which we have the least control when using software, content management systems, or online services like Google Forms or Formstack. Many form-creation services don’t allow customization of field label displays, dimensions of input boxes, typography, or grouping and placement of fields. However, if you have control over the appearance of your online forms, I encourage you to consider how you can manipulate these elements to promote usability:

Results from user testing of forms, including eye-tracking studies, indicate that users see labels above and to the left of fields. Putting labels above fields reduces the eye movement required to scan the labels and fields, but can result in the form appearing longer.

Reading right-aligned text is harder than reading left-aligned text, especially if your question runs over more than one line. For simple, often requested data, right-aligned field labels will enable users to move swiftly through a group of fields. However, if you form asks unfamiliar questions that requires people to scan labels to learn what’s required, left-aligned labels work best.

Make your forms more organized by grouping related fields together. You can do this using placement, spacing, alignment, and background color.

Users with different experience levels and motivations will interact with web forms differently. By providing well-organized and easy-to-use forms for the public and for I&R Specialists, we’ll be more likely to succeed in collecting the information we need.

You MAY be tempted to use bold, italic, and CAPITALS and underlining to emphasize IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Problem: you can END UP with a sort of VISUAL SOUP where none of the emphasisworks.

It’s challenging to design a user manual, resource guide, or other sort of instructional document without falling back on these kinds of typographic variations. There are so many points that need to be emphasized, and you want to make sure your audience (readers or end-users) pays attention to the important information. Here’s some advice that seems good:

There’s so much to find on the web about this topic, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s one suggestion with (probably) more to come as I continue to investigate usability and user experience in the world of online forms.

These papers show that the quality of user research in our field is rising, that researchers know how to label and use methods appropriately, and that they are using a greater variety of methods. Finally, researchers seem to acknowledge that user research requires one small step after another. Instead of painting a big picture with a single user study that has many research questions, they do multiple smaller in-depth research projects, which can be interconnected like one big picture puzzle that might, in the end, give a better impression of how our users actually behave and what they really need.

Isn’t this exciting? I hope to see more jobs like the one Purdue has posted. To me, it’s a sign that libraries are finally moving towards seriously integrating UX into all our digital products and services. Maybe one day more than 28% of the major databases we subscribe to might even be accessible to people using adaptive technology?

I think I want to do some sort of review of how various socially-oriented websites have dealt with vocab control issues when their folksonomies become bothersome, aka when they realize things that should be retrieved are probably not being retrieved, and it is effecting the user experience enough to merit some sort of vocabulary control effort.

I became interested in how LibraryThing has gone about this when I did a search for books tagged with “science fiction” and was informed that the system automatically also searched for books tagged “scifi” “sci-fi” “science-fiction” etc. “Who told it to do this?” I thought. Then I found out. For more on LibraryThing tagging and subject headings, see this post and this post.

All of this got me thinking about what makes people tag, and more importantly, what makes people want to put the effort into telling a system, “Hey, these tags should be combined.” I think tagging is one story on a social website, and entirely different for library catalogs. I’ve read way too many lackluster articles about tagging in OPACs, and every one I’ve used that offers the chance to tag seems to be failing at making it worthwhile or useful. The two go hand in hand, of course. If no one sees it as worthwhile to tag, the tagging feature will not be useful to anyone. (this only applies to catalogs that are starting from scratch with their folksonomies, not importing any tag data from somewhere else)(digression: are such things copyrightable? can a site’s folksonomy be considered proprietary even though the tags that comprise it were created by users?)

It seems to me that the motivation behind tagging is that the user is personally invested in the site as a community/social service (wikipedia, stack overflow) or the user knows that they’re putting something into a mass of other things and the only way they or anyone will be able to find it is if they make the effort to tag it (this is why i tag on flickr and delicious but hardly anywhere else, depending on my mood). Sorry to say it but I think most people don’t feel as personally invested in the library as they do in their online communities. (that’s something for my other blog, libraryrants.com)(j/k. but why doesn’t anyone own that domain yet?!). As a user, I appreciate the service the library provides for me, but when I’m in the catalog I don’t usually have the time or patience to tag something. In any case, I only know what tags are relevant to apply after I’ve already finished a book, and why would I look the book up in the catalog after I already read it? I would have to feel very motivated to say “I am going to go tag the books I read in my library catalog so I can help other users find them!” 1. I would have to believe that other users would make use of the tags and 2. I would have to have a lot more time on my hands. And this is coming from someone who is really interested in tags and folksonomies and library catalogs! I think I’m starting to rant. I should buy that domain. Oh, one more thing though: 3. I wouldn’t be motivated to tag in a library catalog because I know that subject headings are there to help me and others find stuff. When I know there’s no such assistance, then I consider making the effort to tag.

But I haven’t started to read The Literature about tagging motivation yet. There are probably revelations to be had.

Anyways: back to the issue as it relates to online communities and social websites and not library catalogs. There is motivation, and there are people realizing that folksonomies + some vocab control = a worthwhile pursuit. To me this is pure magic, and I want to investigate all the creative ways people are coming up with to automatically combine tags, but also to make sure that the resultant preferred terms (and maybe, one day, hierarchies?) suit the language of the community as much as possible. As usual, I am overwhelmed with information.

Leftovers:

In late 2005, Alexander Street Press launched a folksonomically oriented database on women and social movements. But we found that when the size of the user community was only 500 or so academics, folksonomies were not that useful except as adjuncts to an existing taxonomy, or as a help for keyword or full-text search. They are not a silver bullet.

-Stephen Rhind-Tutt, president of Alexander Street Press

The vast majority of [EBSCO] users don’t use our services because they love them, they use them because they have to. I just can’t see college students tagging articles inside EBSCOhost or Pro Quest.

The differing terminology use in tag lists suggests that tagging may be a working example of Vannevar Bush’s associative trails. He argued that associative trails better represented how users actually work with their documents: as a holistic process of association closely tied to themselves and their work rather than by categorisation. This suggests that user tagging could provide additional access points to traditional controlled vocabularies and provide users with the associative classifications necessary to tie documents and articles to time, task and project relationships as well as other associations which are new and novel.

Usability studies show that information seekers in domains with a large number of objects prefer that related items be in meaningful groups to enable them to understand relationships quickly and thus decide how to proceed: without any means to explore and make sense of large quantities of similar items, users feel lost and fail.

Flat tag clouds as currently implemented are not sufficient to provide a semantic, rich and
multidimensional browsing experience over large tagging spaces. There are several reasons for
this:
1. Choosing tags by frequency of use inevitably causes a high semantic density with very few well-known and stable topics dominating the scene (as seen on RawSugar);
2. Providing only an alphabetical criterion to sort tags heavily limits the ability to quickly navigate, scan and extract, and hence build a coherent mental model out of tags;
3. A flat tag cloud cannot visually support semantic relationships between tags. We suggest that these relationships are needed to improve the user experience and general usefulness of the system;
4. Current tag clouds often fail to provide complex logical operation over tags. Simply clicking on a tag is not enough to enable a smooth and powerful exploration or refinement.
Even if FaceTag doesn’t promise to address all of these issues, we believe our approach can limit the impact of linguistic complications such as polysemy, homonymy and basic level variation while introducing an innovative, multidimensional and more semantic paradigm for organizing,
navigating and searching large information spaces through tags.
To reach this goal, FaceTag contributes to social tagging systems in three ways:
1. The use of (optional) tag hierarchies. Users have the possibility to organize their resources by means of parent-child relationships;
2. Tag hierarchies are semantically assigned to editorially established facets that can be later leveraged on to flexibly navigate the resource domain;
3. Tagging and searching can be mixed to maximize findability, browsability and user-discovery.

For a while I have been meaning to go to the public library and experiment with browsing the Web using JAWS (it’s installed on all THEIR public computers), but now I can do it from the comfort of my desk! I’ve already tried searching my library catalog and navigating our website using WebAnywhere. It works…mostly? I just did basic stuff, and I haven’t attempted any databases yet. One issue that might be significant is that our OPAC times-out after a rather small amount of time. It took me so long to “read” through the page and the list of search results that by the time I picked one to look at a more detailed record, my session had expired and I had to re-do my search. Anyways, I’m really excited that there’s a more “lightweight” tool for navigating the web via screen reader. Instead of just following accessibility guidelines when designing websites, now I can actually see what my pages sound like. (edit: I didn’t know about the accessibility validation tool Cynthia Says before today either). I wonder if a lot of people who are blind or have visual impairments are using WebAnywhere. And I wonder how it compares to JAWS or other screen reading software.

Here are some basics from the WebAnywhere site, and (for you multimedia cravers) – a video. I would love to hear about it if anyone is inspired to go access some websites – especially your favorite library catalogs and databases? – and comment on how navigable they are with a screen reader. I’ll probably be posting more about this in the future since I am just so curious about it.

WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. Visit wa.cs.washington.edu to access WebAnywhere directly. And, it’s completely FREE to use!

WebAnywhere will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed. WebAnywhere does not seek to replace existing screen readers – it has some big limitations, namely that it will not provide access to desktop applications like word processors or spreadsheets.